Manil Suri - The City of Devi

It is not quite the clean fragrance of pomfret freshly caught, when you first slice it, or prawns, cold and pink, when you pull their shells off. No, this has a whiff of pungency, just this side of rot, the kind that hovers over nameless denizens displayed in the sun too long. I think back to the crush of people that materialized out of the empty streets as if by a magician’s trick. Was there a machiwalli in the crowd? Who managed like me to squeeze in past the iron hospital gate and the gesticulating sentries somehow? I look around the room, wondering, absurdly, if I might make a purchase. Small misshapen creatures left over in the machiwalli’s basket, best disinfected with spices and sterilized in hot oil. But none of the women carries a basket. They stare back at me—housewives, maids, saffron-clad devotees, jewelry-laden socialites. Have they smelled it as well? Are they thinking of crisp machi-fry too?

Ever since Karun disappeared, the only way I can distract myself is to think about food. I reminisce about the roasted corn vendors who used to sit along Marine Drive, the shuttered dosa shop down the street, even the McDonald’s at Colaba that fell victim to the very first bombing raid. Puris puff and crisp in my mind as I roll out my daily quota of chappatis made with gritty black-market flour. Imaginary chops sizzle in cumin-scented oil as I throw a stingily measured portion of lentils yet again into the pot. No matter how hard I try, though, my thoughts keep returning to Karun. I would gladly forsake all the food in the world, never let it stray past my lips again, if only I could be assured of my reunion with him.

I unwrap the pomegranate from my dupatta. I picture its juice beading on Karun’s lips. His tongue wiping it off, tasting the sweet and the sour, leaving behind a thin trace of the red. Doubt clutches at me again. To believe in folly like this, such desperation, such old wives’ tales. And yet all I need, I remind myself, is for him to remember those nights we played this game. I squeeze the pomegranate for reassurance, feel the smoothness of its skin. What made him leave so abruptly, in such an agitated state? Was it me from whom he was trying to get away? Will I ever see him again—all the disasters that could have befallen him in the eighteen days since?

I calm myself by imagining the spell taking effect. He stretches in bed, his shirt pulls up, and I notice its shadow against his skin. I pull it up higher and kiss his navel, pull it to his neck and kiss his clavicle, then rest my chin on his chest and lose myself somewhere along the line that separates his lips.

IT WAS THIS LINE that first drew me in. Not the eyes or the nose or the actual lips themselves but rather the way they rested against each other. What did the darkness between them signify? A hint of mystery? A mark of shyness? I felt an invitation there to explore what lay beyond his face, a promise of empathy I had not sensed in the scores of photographs I had evaluated over the years.

Of course I expertly scanned the other parts of the photo as well. I made sure his ears were both the same size and examined his hair for flecks of gray. I searched for scars and blemishes and found one on his chin. (A fall from a swing, perhaps—was he a daredevil still?) His eyes were set a little close together, but I didn’t find the effect unappealing. He looked like a boy posing in a childhood photograph, staring just past the camera at someone for reassurance—his mother, perhaps.

I kept being pulled back to the curve. The way it rose from the corner of his mouth to outline the innocence of each lip. The way it darkened intriguingly at its midpoint before continuing on its path, as graceful and symmetric as a mathematical plot. How did it change through the course of a day? Did it widen when he laughed, twist when he was angry, smudge when he was sad? What effect would desire have on it?

“Not bad, is he?” my sister Uma said, taking the photograph from my hand. “But let me warn you right away—he’s a scientist just like Anoop and the rest of them, and you know how those people are.” She rolled her eyes at me, though I knew she was fairly satisfied with my brother-in-law to whom she had been married three years. “Though you, with your statistics, should be able to better relate.”

I took the photograph back from her. A scientist, I thought, and imagined Karun with test tubes and microscopes, with banks of computer lights blinking in the background. Only the sheen of filing cabinets glimmered behind him in the picture. “So, do we have a fourth person for the picnic?” Uma inquired.

“Why ask me?” I replied. She could tell I was intrigued. “He’s Anoop’s friend—let him be the one to decide.”

Uma smiled meaningfully at my mother, who sighed. She believed in old-fashioned visits by the boy to the girl’s house, not these sorts of informal meetings. She had objected in the beginning, when Uma started setting up picnics and restaurant outings and once even a movie with two male colleagues. But we had already tried more formal routes without any success. The networking, the astrologers, the classified ads, all these had failed. I had approved at least a half dozen boys and came close to matrimony on three separate occasions, but a last-minute problem always intervened. The most recent match was the worst, almost permanently killing my chances: the boy’s grandfather passed away just before the wedding and his family declared me inauspicious, blaming the death on me. “Who knows how long our Bunty would have survived in her shadow?” they went around saying.

Last month I turned thirty-one (though prospective matches were told twenty-eight). In a few weeks I would complete my M.A. in statistics (my second master’s—I already had one in management sciences). With this latest degree, I would be not only old but also over-educated, my prospects slimmer still. My mother knew she had no choice but to agree to events like this picnic—her fear was that I might embark on yet another degree, immure myself permanently in the nunnery of college. “Do you even know what kind of family he comes from?” she asked worriedly.

“We’re just meeting him for a picnic, not digging up his ancestral tree,” Uma replied. “He’ll be here next Sunday—if you’re so worried, you can ask him yourself.”

I suspected that my sister had started arranging these meetings partly out of guilt. Being younger than me by three years made it all the more awkward that I remained unmarried. “Sarita’s been so busy exercising her brain that she hasn’t had time for her heart, the poor thing,” my mother would offer embarrassedly, by way of explanation. Except I think she had it backwards, that I buried myself in books precisely because of my lack of popularity, of romantic success. Ever since childhood, I’d been burdened with the epithet of the brainy one—perhaps I would have gladly cast off this reputation had more opportunities for fun come my way. I sometimes wished I enjoyed schoolwork less—like Uma, for instance, whose circle of friends seemed to widen each time her class rank dipped. Even my mother and she bonded over their shared phobia of algebra in ways I never could.

By the time I finished my bachelor’s in statistics, I had experienced the first inklings of how lonely a future might be lying in wait. “Numbers are her friends,” everyone kept repeating, as if I shrank from the prospect of two-legged company. I applied for the management master’s on a lark—with only twenty students selected nationwide, the scholarship offer caught me by surprise when it came. Could this be a solution? A way to break free of the shell I’d been pigeonholed in, to enter a field that depended on human interaction as its very basis? With the added remunerative promise of participating in the great Indian economic boom, surely this was an opportunity too good to miss?